While Washing Up

I have discovered that it is a rare bit of washing up that cannot be done in the time it takes to listen to an episode of that British institution, Radio 4's The Archers. I do remember Victoria Wood saying once that she'd stopped listening to The Archers and started going into the shed and staring at the wall and found that much more interesting, but she was being harsh. Such a judgment is also, sadly, out of date, as the programme is now maddeningly racy, whereas before it was like cricket on the radio, (or, in Australia, the parliamentary live broadcast), just soothing background noise.

Unfortunately, The Archers is now:

a: a branch of whichever ministry is in charge of government service announcements, ("Oh, have you heard that lichen has been disappearing in the countryside because of spraying, Joe?", "No, Bert, but I've noticed there's not so much lichen on the village stone walls as there once was." "Yerrsse, well apparently there's a spray called 245T that we didn't ought to be using, but everyone is using it." "Is that right, Jo? Why, I think I've got a tin of that somewhere," "Well you should take it into Borchester to be safely disposed of, the offices in question are open nationwide between the hours of 6 and 10 on Tuesdays and Thursdays and they will welcome your visit, I'm absolutely certain", etc, etc)

and b: the place ex-Eastenders producers, directors and writers go for audio frolics.  As a result, while we may not be subjected to the kind of graphic sex Geoff Dyer decided to suddenly shove into one of the most up until then amusing books I'd ever read - (Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; what was he thinking? Either that he could do DH Lawrence better than DH Lawrence, when it comes to sex, or that it was quite funny to claim that a few pages later that he wasn't the kind of man who boasts about sex, or just that he felt like shoving our faces in it; my view is that very detailed depictions of other people, fictitious or not, performing sexual acts upon one another leave the person doing the reading or viewing in the position of a voyeur and that there should therefore be warnings on such works of art so that those of us who would prefer not to be voyeurs could choose something else to look at or read) - we do get a lot of story lines about lurve rather than about almost nothing, which is what one used to expect from "an everyday story of country folk", (come to think of it, is The Archers still characterised in that way by the BBC? Probably not).

And not only lurve - there has also been masses of anguished stuff about rural poverty, domestic violence, gambling addiction, not to mention fermented and artisanal food. Worse still, the perfectly good actors who used to play, for example, Tom and his father, Tony, suddenly got replaced (on the grounds, I read, that they weren't experienced enough; I suspect some form of nepotism somewhere), and we were supposed not to notice. How could anyone not notice that suddenly we had one of the men from A Very Peculiar Practice playing Tony and a person with a much more annoying manner playing Tom, (which I suppose you could argue is a good move, given that Tom is very annoying as a character. But then aren't they all?)

So, if it is all such a disappointment, why do I keep on listening? Well, as I say, it does fit in very well with the time it takes to do the washing up. Additionally, and more importantly, very, very occasionally, the programme is, if not stupendously brilliant, at least faintly perceptive. An example of this occurred last week, when in a very short piece of dialogue the problem at the heart of the disintegration of contemporary life was expressed for all to hear.

The dialogue in question took place between a fairly new character,  filthy rich, new-money businessman Justin and old-money, widowed Oliver. They were talking about the possible sale of Oliver's dead wife's hotel, Grey Gables. Oliver has some debts, but he cannot bear to sell his farm, as the Grundys, the programmes ne'er-do-well heart-of-gold yokels, live there and he has promised not to shift them. Thus he wants to sell the hotel instead.

Justin, talking about Grey Gables: Old charm can only take you so far when you're trying to maximise profits
Oliver: Which is what you want to do?
Justin: It's what everyone wants to do. That might mean redundancies, high staff turnover ...
Oliver:That's my greatest concern - Caroline had such a loyal staff. They loved her and I don't want to let them down
Justin: It's a hard world out there, Oliver

There we have it, that phrase "maximise profits". What the hell happened to making a profit? Why isn't that enough, in combination with running a business that takes care of its staff and customers? Why is maximising profits at all costs the new thing? What happened to the idea of business being both profitable and community minded? How can we change back to that better way - the pre-Thatcher, triple-bottom-line approach? I think we urgently need to do so.

For the long version of how frightful everything is because of the unrelenting, singleminded drive to maximise profits at all costs, regardless of the consequences, this is a very complicated but utterly absorbing and hair-raising read. For the short version, stay tuned to the washing up and The Archers. Grey Gables will soon be luxury apartments, sod old world charm; you mark my words.

How to Be Rich

Since the Grenfell Tower inferno, I've been thinking a lot about my favourite uncle. This may seem odd, given that he was a wealthy landowner, a man whose father had been a brilliant stockbroker and also a brilliant art collector - the family owned a Pissarro, a Manet, a Sickert and various other marvellous paintings, all bought at a time when their creators were just starting out. The house these paintings were kept in was a sprawling Victorian mansion, set on a hill and surrounded by beautifully planted parkland. After the death of his older brother in the Second World War, all this had come to my uncle, making him a very rich man.

But as far as my uncle was concerned wealth brought with it responsibilities. He did not loll about in luxury, spurning the community in which he lived. Instead, he was involved in everything to do with his local village, serving in a variety of unpaid roles on committees, school boards and as a church warden. He was deeply concerned about the countryside and its preservation, particularly the disappearance of hedgerows. He provided houses for each of the people who worked for him. He threw parties that enlivened the social life of the area. He was generous and open and interested in the little world in which he lived.

So when he noticed in about 1980 that house prices in the village were rising enormously because people from London were buying houses there and commuting daily to the city, he didn't just shrug his shoulders and mutter something about market forces. Instead, he became worried about the children of the villagers who could no longer afford to live in what was their home.  "Something should be done", he thought - or rather, "I should do something". He turned the problem over in his mind and before long he came up with an idea. He went to the council and made a proposal. The council called a meeting at which the proposal was to be put.

It seemed such a good idea - not to mention generous. My uncle was offering to give to the village a large - and very valuable - field. It was in a perfect position, just across from the village post office. It would be an ideal place to build community housing so that the village's new generation would no longer be driven out by rising costs.

I was staying when the council meeting took place. My uncle had explained what was happening to me and he set off down the drive in an enthusiastic frame of mind. He was looking forward to discussing exactly what sorts of dwellings would be best suited to the setting and how many buildings it might be possible to provide.

An hour and a half later my uncle returned, a changed man. The meeting had been the best attended of any in the village's recent history. There was barely a person from among the village's new population who had not made the time to come along. But the reason for the high turn out was not enthusiasm for the project. In fact, my uncle's offer was rejected outright. The people who had gathered in the village hall that evening regarded it as an absolutely outrageous proposition and turned it down point blank. It would have been legitimate to want to know about the design of the buildings and to seek assurances that they would be in keeping with the rest of the village but the problem did not lie with details of that kind. It was the principle the newcomers baulked at. Community housing would bring down the value of their homes and there was no way in the world that they were going to be having that.

Perhaps the rot had set in earlier than that meeting. I do remember that, a year or so before, my uncle's junior gardener had married and my uncle had built a house for the couple, but instead of being pleased the gardener's new wife had regarded this as patronising, since the house was nowhere near as big as my uncle's own. I thought she was just a difficult woman, but she may have been a harbinger of a change in attitudes. The more likely explanation though, I think, was the shift from Macmillan's brand of Toryism to Thatcher's, in which the concept of the triple bottom line was swept away and replaced by the idea that the only important thing was the right of the individual to elbow their way ahead, with no thought for kindness or taking others into account.

It is unfashionable now to suggest that a system that includes the rich as anything other than hated rapacious monsters can ever be a good thing. However, I suspect that the cliche about the poor always being with us can as easily be refashioned to apply to the rich. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is an argument that would take far too long to go into; what I do believe though is that, while the rich remain among us, we need to recreate in them - and in all of us, to some extent - that instinctive sense of duty and responsibility to others that was, until the night of his rejection at the local village council meeting, a dominant part of my uncle's approach to life. If noblesse oblige was still a flourishing concept, I doubt that the disaster at Grenfell Tower - caused, we are led to believe, by lack of care and penny pinching on the part of a very rich council - would ever have happened. If a greater sense of care and responsibility for the people we live amongst can replace narrow self-interest as a central value in modern society we may help to prevent similar horrors from occurring in the future. Surely it's worth a try.